At the heart of Black History Month is the importance of education. ASALH’s
annual theme for 2017, "The Crisis in Black Education,” is especially relevant
today, given the heated controversy surrounding the hearings and confirmation of
the Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. It is no understatement to say that this
appointment by President Trump has sparked tremendous concern in regard to the
fate of public schools for minorities and the poor. ASALH shares this concern
and also emphasizes that the problem of educational inequality has a long
history in America. In the days of slavery, state laws deemed it illegal to
teach slaves to read and write. Even in the Northern free states, where slavery
was outlawed, black children could not get an equal education. In Connecticut in
1833 the white educator Prudence Crandall found her school burned to the ground
because it was dedicated to the education of young black girls. The legal case
Roberts v. City of Boston in 1850 represents the story of the courageous Roberts
family and of the larger black community’s protest efforts against the city’s
segregated public schools. The problem of inequality is central to the history
of black education. In the public schools of the southern states as well as in
northern states, in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston and
many other cities, racial inequality has been the target of civil rights
litigation throughout the twentieth-century. Indeed litigation and newspaper
coverage today call attention to not only unequal resources but also incidents
of racial prejudice in urban public schools. ASALH urges greater resolve toward
addressing the existing problems in regard to the education of black persons at
both the K-12 and college/ university levels. These problems are multiple and
varied in nature. They include: the lack of resources in inner city schools, the
pipeline-to-prison reality for many youths, the summer-learning gap, the
too-often placement of black male children in special education classes, the
severe financial challenges at many historically black colleges and
universities, and not least of all the failure to teach correctly, if at all,
the experiences as well as contributions of African Americans to this nation.
ASALH believes that to refuse to acknowledge the education of black people as a
crisis belittles the importance of the many efforts to confront and combat the
problems. Let us commemorate Black History Month by renewing our commitment to
addressing the crisis in black education.